One question I’m asked at conferences is whether or not I use Twitter. I don’t. I’m quite happy using the Facebook status setting if I have something to say in 140 characters or less, and I don’t want to have another time-suck that pulls me away from doing things that need to be done.

Matt McGee and Jeff Quipp both used to be of the same opinion… now they’ve turned to the dark side and begun tweeting. On the plus side, they’ve turned it into a little competition, with money being donated to the charity of the winner by the one who gets to 500 followers last.

As for me, I’ll still resist the bright lights of Twitter, and follow the advice of the late Frankie Howerd…

If you’ve seen the TV show Jekyl, you’ll recognize the lead in this commercial…

This morning I received an email claiming to be from Blogging Zoom (I say claiming as the email address used to send the note was from  insert_your_email_address_here@server.hostgatorz.com, based on the the fact that this is also over on their blog, spelling and grammatical errors and all, I believe that it’s legit and they just messed up on the email). This note complains about the number of cut and paste submissions that have been showing up on BloggingZoom.

No More Copy Paste!!! We have made over 5 post since the birth of Blogging Zoom letting Bloggers know that they are not allowed to copy paste submissions. Your description has to be original. Now we had given an opportunity for new bloggers to get accustomed to the system and we hoped once they read all the post about submitting with copy paste, it would stopped. Unfortunately this has not happened… Every time you copy and paste your content in a submission let it be here at Blogging Zoom or any other social voting site you are giving yourself and Blogging Zoom a duplicate content filter penalty with Google.

So what do they intend to do about this?

One warning will be given, if the following submission after the warning is a copy paste submission we will be forced to BAN the URL from Blogging Zoom.

So, if there’s someone that you want to get banned from Blogging Zoom, just simply go and submit a couple of their articles over the next few days, cutting and pasting text from the article. Would they care? Well, according to Blogging Zoom, they should, as they’re bigger than Digg*

*Blogging Zoom is heading toward one day being a much stronger site then Digg and any other social site. If you need proof of this look at our Alexa vs Digg we are month ahead in traffic for the same time of Digg. If you want to be a Power Zoomer and grow with Blogging Zoom please help the community.

Yesterday I wrote a post on EndlessPlain.com titled “8 tips for Blogging Inspiration”, the traffic that it generated for the site was fantastic, so I though that I’d post a little bit over here, for anyone that has yet to check out that site (I typically post on that site every Monday, as well as whenever it strikes my fancy).

…So what happens when you’re down to the last minute, and you have our newly redefined problem - Blogger’s Block? There are several things that you can do. The easiest thing to do is, of course, nothing. However, that’s not a strategy that’s going to be conducive to the long term growth of your readership, so instead, here’s a list of real (fairly quick) solutions for your problem;

1. Link Post: Do a post where you link out to posts or articles that you’ve recently read that you think are great. Why not expose your readers to them? If you’re worried about losing your readers, don’t. Instead you may find that they’ll like you for exposing them to some great new stuff, and they’ll come back to you to see what else you recommend…

To read the rest of the article you’ll just have to head over to EndlessPlain.com and read “8 tips for Blogging Inspiration“

It has been reported today that Facebook lost 6 big brand UK advertisers due to a lack of controls in their ad targeting. The main complaint of these advertisers was that their ads were being displayed on the group page for the British National Party, a right wing, anti immigration, anti Europe political party. Yesterday, it was reported that Vodafone and First Direct had pulled their advertising, but that Virgin Media, Halifax, Prudential, and the AA (Automobile Association) still had ads displaying. Today, all 4 of those companies pulled their ads. Virgin even went as far as to pull all advertising from all social media sites.

It looks like Facebook needs to implement a better way of targeting ads, so that companies can be ensured that their ads don’t display in locations that are against the goals or beliefs of the company. According to the article, Facebook hasn’t yet commented on this story, but given that they’re apparently charging $300,000 for a 3 month placement, you’d think that this issue would have moved up the priority ladder over the last 24 hours…

<update> If you go to the BNP group page (which I’m not even going to no-follow link to), you’ll see that there are now no ads displayed on that page.  However, there are other BNP groups out there that still have ads displaying, maybe Facebook will clean those up too…

Lisa Barone over at the Bruce Clay blog recently posted about why “Your Boss is not your Friend“. She talked about why you shouldn’t connect with your boss, and how you should avoid it - “deny, deny, deny”. I’m going to disagree with her, and explain why you should at least accept that LinkedIn request from your boss…

LinkedIn is a much more professional social site, that allows professionals to link up and recommend each other (I’ll have a more comprehensive overview up on RBDRodeo later this week). When you link with your boss, you can see all of their connections (unless they’re sneaky, and have hidden them). Whenever your boss adds a new connection, there’s a notification that goes up on your LinkedIn page to let you know. Simply clicking on that link allows you to see who your boss is linking with… it can give you an idea of future strategic partnerships, new investors, prospective employees, recruiters, etc. So by friending your boss, you can get somewhat of an insight into what’s happening at your company. Yes, you’ve got to be careful who you link to as well, but in my experience LinkedIn is a nice spying corporate information resource. Heck, you can always accept your bosses friend request, then remove them… there’s no notification, and they may not notice…

Tired of not being one of the ‘cool kids’? You read all over the internet about these new, invite only, closed Social Media beta sites, where it seems like everyone bar you already has a login? Well here are 2 solutions to your non-invite woes.

InviteShare is a site that allows users to share invites. If you happen to get into an invite only site, then you can go there and invite other people who are interested in playing with that site. The more people you invite, the higher your name goes on the priority list for invites to other sites. They currently list 44 different sites from Pownce to iwantsandy. You may have to wait for a while to get an invite to a popular site, but you should still be able to get in faster than if you hadn’t used the service.

BugMeNot is a site that you use when you don’t want an invite, but still want to get in.

People provide the site with a login and password, which then becomes communal property. Of course, when these sites detect the same login being used on many different IP addresses at the same time, they tend to shut down that login, so don’t expect them to always work.

Anyway, I’d better go and play with these new social media sites that I just got invites for, just like all the ‘cool kids’.

According to metro.co.uk, Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of the English Premier League Champions - Manchester United has banned his players from using Facebook because

Ferguson is worried they will be stalked by girls and get themselves into trouble with revealing photos or wall messages

Interesting that Facebook is the only site that he appears to have banned. I guess that’s where all the female stalkers are…

Time magazine recently released their list of the worst 5 websites, and coming in at number 4 was Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace. The reason they give for MySpace falling from their 50 best websites of 2006 to the list of sites to avoid?

The community has become infested with marketers and other opportunists who create false profiles and essentially spam other users

They then follow that by referring to these marketers as leeches.  I don’t know where they get this idea from.  I mean, when looking at my MySpace friends I can clearly see that there’s a section of them that are obviously twins / triplets who sometimes share the same clothes / pose, so despite the fact I’ve never heard of any of them, they’re clearly not spam accounts. 

As a meetup.com meetup organizer, I get promotional emails from the service, and I received a rather interesting one yesterday. Apparently Starbucks has realized that a service that had over 54,000 meetings in the month of May alone needs places to hold those meetings. So they’ve rolled out a pilot program in VA, DC & MD, whereby you can find a local Starbucks to host your meeting. It’s obvious what Starbucks gets out of it, but what does the meeting get out of it?

Well, for a start they’re going to give you reserved seating for your party, that’s a huge one, especially if you’re meeting in a busy location. They also state that they’re going to give your meeting extra promotion, and give you support. While that may just mean that they write your meeting up on a whiteboard behind the counter, it’s still something.

If you run a meetup in the VA, DC, MD area, all you have to do is email starbucks at meetup.com and you may have one of the meeting setup headaches taken care of for you.